


Blair's Saturday

by Bluewolf458



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Gen, Sentinel Thursday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-25
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-08-17 07:03:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8134711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluewolf458/pseuds/Bluewolf458
Summary: Blair is doing some work for the university





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Sentinel Thursday prompt 'calendar', with a nod to the older prompt 'obsessed'

Blair's Saturday

by Bluewolf

Jim shook his head with an affectionate resignation as Blair searched out 'things' on his laptop, occasionally stopping to scribble something on the notepad beside it. (He had once asked Blair why he didn't just open another window on the laptop and copy whatever it was into it; Blair had thought about it for a moment before saying, "I've always found it easier to remember and organize if I actually write it down.")

At one point Blair stopped, looked at the pad, frowned then turned his attention back to the laptop.

Another scribble, another search, then one last scribble, and Blair straightened, stretched, rose and crossed to the fridge. "Beer?" he asked.

"Thanks."

Blair took two beers from the fridge, flipped the tops off and detoured to the couch to give one to Jim, before returning to his laptop.

"What are you doing, anyway?" Jim asked. It was spring break, Rainier was closed for two weeks, and Blair's time was his own - unfortunately it was really too early in the year to go camping - so why was he apparently researching something.

Blair made a not too exasperated a face. "Every year the anthropology/archaeology department in one of the universities compiles a calendar. Printing masters of the calendar are sent to each university, and they print copies for sale to their students. They're not expensive and give the students pictures of some sites, some tribes, some artefacts, that they might not have encountered before; and some information on what's in the picture. Whoever compiles the calendar usually picks a theme, though it's not compulsory.

"This year it's Rainier's turn, and I drew the short straw. I thought about not having a specific theme, but in the end decided to go with one."

"Isn't it very early in the year to be compiling a calendar for next year?" Jim asked.

"Think about it," Blair said. "How early do you see next year's calendars in the shops?"

Jim frowned. "November?"

"August. Sometimes even as early as July, so firms that put out calendars start work on them very early; you need time to compile them, get the masters ready, get them printed. Okay, we don't produce our calendars until October, and we're talking small numbers, not the hundreds of thousands professional firms produce, so I could wait till the summer, but I'd rather start now, give myself plenty of time to make sure I have the best selection of pictures I can find, get permission to use them - a lot of photos you see in magazines - or in this case the internet - are copyright.

"I do have two or three I took myself so there's no problem about using them, or I know the guys who took them, but there are one or two that were taken by professional photographers and they will definitely be copyright. I'll avoid using them if I can, but..."

"Can't you just use all your own photos?" Jim asked.

"I'd like to - it would make life much easier - but there are some sites I want to use that I haven't visited."

"So why not just stick with the ones you have visited?"

"We usually have a theme, remember? Last year's was 'fishing' - covered a range from fish traps and fishing spears to modern trawling. It was nice, but it wasn't terribly imaginative."

"So what's your theme?"

Blair grinned. "Calendars."

"Calendars?"

"The last three years the themes have all been anthropology, which hasn't exactly been fair to the archaeology students. The rules really should allow for alternating the two, but it's always gone according to which professor has done the job. This year Rainier decided to give the job to a TA, and like I said I drew the short straw. So I decided to make my focus archaeology. But though I've visited some archaeological sites, it was never my main focus of study. I don't have many photos from those sites."

"Where do calendars fit into archaeology?"

"A lot of sites have astronomical significance. Stones aligned with sunrise or sunset, or moonrise and moonset; there are several sites where the rising or setting sun shines down a passageway into a cairn, probably a burial cairn, usually on the longest or shortest day. The rising sun on the shortest day would seem to make more sense - the days are beginning to lengthen, the sun has defeated the gods of winter..."

"Awkward if the sky is totally clouded over," Jim muttered.

Blair ignored that. "At midsummer, the days are shortening, times of hardship are coming - not something to celebrate. Anyway, many of the astronomical sites date back to the stone age, and I've been looking at a mixture of different types from all over the world. Some I haven't been able to find good photos of but I've short listed twelve possibilities, though I really need to find one more for the cover."

"All over the world?" Jim asked.

"There's Arizona's Casa Malpais which was constructed so that the sunlight shines through an opening at the solstices and the equinoxes; the Calcoene megalithic observatory in Brazil - that's been called the Amazon Stonehenge. In Abu Simnal - that's in Egypt - the axis of the temple was angled so that twice a year the rays of the sun would penetrate the sanctuary and illuminate the sculpture of the gods on the back wall, except for Ptah, the god connected with the Underworld - he was placed so that the sun didn't shine on him. I couldn't leave out Stonehenge. Ireland - at one of the two sites I've chosen, Drombeg, a stone is aligned with the winter solstice sunset as seen through a conspicuous notch in the distant hills. It isn't absolutely precise - that could owe something to a slight alteration in the Earth's orbit since the stone was laid down, or maybe it just had something to do with the lie of the land. The other Irish one is Newgrange, where the rising sun at midwinter shines down the entrance passageway. Then there's Cahokia in Mississippi, where there are a lot of solar alignments. New Mexico has Chaco Canyon, where buildings seem to have been aligned to capture solar and lunar cycles. Then there's Newark Earthworks in Ohio - that's thought to have been a lunar observatory. Orkney has Maes Howe, another one where the light shines down the entrance passageway at midwinter, and there's another Scottish one at Ballochroy, with three standing stones that are aligned with distant geographical features and archaeologists think the ancients designed that to pinpoint the solstices; and I couldn't possibly leave out the Nazca lines in Peru with all the hype about they were marked to draw aliens to a landing site. So that's my twelve months. In a way it's a pity the sites I've chosen are mostly in Britain or the Americas, so I'll do a little more digging over the next day or two, see if I can find photos of sites in other countries.

"I'd definitely like to find something in Australia - the knowledge was there, but none of the sources I have so far mention anything like carvings. Same with the Polynesians - they certainly had the knowledge, but again there doesn't seem to have been the urge to build anything to mark specific annual events like the solstices. And I need something for a cover - but there are Neolithic carvings showing things like the position of sunrise at the solstices and that would do perfectly well." 

Long before Blair finished, Jim's eyes had begun to glaze over, and Blair grinned. "Well, you did ask." He stretched. "I think I'll give it a break for today; I've got plenty of time, after all. I'll concentrate on reading through Australasian astronomical knowledge tomorrow. For the rest of today I'll just remember that officially this is spring break, it's Saturday and I can do anything I want... "

Jim grinned. "There's not much left of today. I was just thinking of getting dinner ready."

"As late as that? And... You didn't go out at all?"

"It's been raining all day, Chief - nothing to encourage me to go out."

"Oh."

"I've just been enjoying having the day off - relaxing, reading - and watching you obsess over what you were doing."

"Jim, haven't you realized how much I enjoy studying, finding out things? Oh, I had some surface knowledge of all this - " he indicated his notebook - " but now I have a little more in-depth knowledge, and that can never be a bad thing."

"And what will you do with the knowledge, now you have it?"

Blair grinned. "Pass it on to my students?"

"And what will they do with it?"

Blair sighed. "Mostly? Probably forget it. But one or two might be interested enough to choose the study of prehistoric astronomy as a career. And seriously - that's all teachers can do, really - provide jumping off points to show students directions in which they can go.

"Now - what's for dinner? I'm beginning to get quite hungry."


End file.
